


To Do, To Make

by EternalEclipse



Category: Bleach
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Dark, Gen, Growing Up, Lots of Angst, Poor Kisuke, Probably Hopeful, Second Person but from Kisuke's POV, Sort Of, The Onmitsukido Is Its Own Warning, Weird POV, author doesn't know how to tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-06 16:41:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16836502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EternalEclipse/pseuds/EternalEclipse
Summary: Kisuke breaks in intervals, because a Rukon rat has no other options. The shadows are welcoming, and hide the cracks in his bones.





	To Do, To Make

She’s seven-hundred seventy-six, and you’re who-knows-what, Rukon rats like you don’t count time except in how long it’s been since you lost someone, or for you how long it’s been since your last meal. It doesn’t really matter how old you are, because seventy-six comes to Seventy-Six and offers you a job. You look between soft hands and a pair of sharp blades behind her, and behind you, and you accept.

Seventy-six years later, you’re no longer bothered by the sharp blades because you have one too, even if she’s locked up too much of the time for you to learn her properly. Your princess croons to you that you can fix them up all pretty in their crimson blood, and you soothe her, ignore her, because in seventy-six years you’ve only seen the sunlight twice that number of times and you want to do it again.

Seventy-six days later, when you present her with your research, you present her with your blade instead, through her neck. She falls. Smiles. Steps out from behind a curtain and moves so quickly that you can’t even see her, only feel the whisper-thin sensation of hair being cut off at your neck, not a touch of steel on skin. As you stand surrounded by your golden declaration of war, your maker laughs, and calls in her daughter and her daughter’s daughter. You’re going off to war, she says, and you don’t know what war is but it has got to be better than here.

You learn to count in seventy-threes instead of seventy-sixes, three days sloughed off like your hair. Seventy-three is a half-term at the Academy, and there are seventy-three days without ostensible obligation in two terms, one day in five when you do not eat. The granddaughter keeps an eye on you, laughing sharply as she steals the hairbands you start wearing the moment your hair grows back long enough to tie. She grins at you the one time you’re bold enough to steal hers back, pretending that there’s nothing more to this game than this.

There’s another you recognize from the labs here, brown hair cut shorter than yours now and glasses he doesn’t need so he doesn’t need to look anyone in the eyes. You’re properly wary around him, because there are no friends in the labs, but it takes him three seventy-threes to act, sabotaging your projects at the last possible minute when the granddaughter you cannot ignore steals you away. Three days pass in an instant, like lightning through mist, and you begin to understand. 

Now you’re older than you ever thought you’d live to be, and you’re starting to learn hope. A Rukon rat can disappear into the dark, but a Shinigami manages a place in the light. Your body may never be your own again, but at least your mind can claim a measure of privacy after seven years in the light. Third in your class, because you daren’t threaten the girl who steals all of you away when your hairband isn’t enough without thinking twice, and because the boy will destroy you otherwise, with illusions you can’t tell from the air. Third of seventy-six had to be enough to learn to breathe.

You learn better. Even shinigami work in the shadows sometimes, and that girl was never going to let you go. Seventy-nine years pass, three more as if to make up for the past you can barely touch, and you see the grass only long enough to dirty it with blood. The girl laughs as her grandmother dies. Your crimson princess laughs, and blood drips down your face from the corner of your eyes. You never get the hang of smiling, but you think that’s just fine, and then you don’t think at all. 

Seventy-nine more years and Third seat after three promotions sends you deeper into the prisons until you’re not sure whether you’re an inmate in prison keeper’s robes. You disappear. You remake yourself in a corner of your mind, fashioning your hands more and more into lethal weapons. You learn that you cannot stay coherent for more than seventy-six hours at a time, and time rights itself again. Every three days, you sleep.

Time ceases to make sense when she tires of your game and moves back to the other’s. You’re a captain now, skin too tight in the light even with your hair and your manner as protection. There aren’t any hairbands anymore, but neither is there someone to steal them, so it works out. You’ve forgotten what freedom tastes like, even if refusing to submit to those below you is a familiar refrain. You’re a bit obsessed with it, a bit not a good leader, but they call it growing pains and a brown-haired boy smirks in your face.

Barely three threes later, barely a minute to catch your breath, and you’re already lost, looking at a game you didn’t know you were playing. Checkmate, and tip your king. The boy wins.

The boy wins, and your timelines don’t make sense. It’s eighty-one years, three and three and three and three, until you see him again. It’s enough to make a plan. You’re in the light now, more than you’ve ever been, and yet you’re hiding, with no greater job nor purpose nor guiding force except the emptiness above and the death below. But you work in the shadows, and the boy awaits you there, so you use the extra time to live rather than exist, to reset the board and not let on that you’ve got a new queen in play.

Your queen grows into a firebrand with hair to match, and like fire he doesn’t wait for permission. But fire scorches the dark away so you disappear. You enclose yourself in a lab, only coming to see the light when you think you’ve earned it, which is only when it’s useful for you to be there. Maybe it’s penance. It’s not the same, but they rhyme. The first time she mentions the woman whose face you can barely remember, her grandmother who drew you into it all, you laugh. Somehow, she laughs too. You’ve become her, just a little. It’s okay, you think. He sees the sun more than twice a day.

You’ve stepped into the light, put yourself on the board, and the boy loses. Your hands shake, for this is not your place. If you’d become the woman who made you, you wouldn’t flinch to think of the firebrand who you burned out, or the captains you bound to him, or the others you’ve used until you’ve used them up. The numbers run together, the people run together, and it’s for the best that no one goes after you, because you’re too broken in the light to fix anything anymore. The shadows are welcoming, and hide the cracks in your bones.

You only apologize to the one, bowing from your knees and hoping it’s enough. The boy, your opponent, is dead. Your princess hasn’t spoken since you chose to fight him without her. Your maker is dead, and her granddaughter dead to you. The fire is dead, and that one is as meant for the dark as you are for the light, but it is to that one you bow. You count three seconds, then nine, then at seventy-six he sighs, and accepts. He’s seventeen and you’re who-knows-what, Rukon rats don’t count their ages except in the months it’s been since you lost someone, and he laughs, and pulls your hat back onto your head and over your eyes until you’re back in the darkness you can’t live without. You smile and present him with your research.

**Author's Note:**

> Porting over from tumblr in the wake of new guidelines :|  
> Originally posted: October 28, 2018
> 
> And incase it’s not clear: You is Kisuke, the boy is Aizen, the granddaughter is Yoruichi, her grandma is an oc, the firebrand is Ichigo, and the princess is Benihime.


End file.
